Blog – Articles
Check out my articles on mastering and engineering.
Mixing down for mastering
If you are a mixing engineer reading this, I’d like to go over just a few ideas for making your mixes perfect for the mastering stage. Many engineers know what I am about to say, I want to mention a few items to help some newer engineers. First is to start your mixes with your channel faders low. A 24 track mix might start with all faders down at -15 to -12 or in that range. Also if the original tracks were recorded very loud, it maybe necessary to reduce the actual wav file inside the audio editor window to avoid peaking any...
read moreCD Mastering for heavy metal music
Mastering for heavy metal is, in many ways, not different from mastering for any other style. But in some ways it does requires an experienced ear. Metal music in all its forms including extreme metal, death metal, black metal, etc is often less dynamic than other forms of rock and roll. Listeners demand a very up front and “in your face sound” so dynamics must be limited. But limiting the dynamics too much can remove the listenability of the music and result in fatigue, causing the listener to change the CD. There is a...
read moreMastering: The final step
Creating a musical album is a three step precess: Recording, mixing and mastering. Mastering originally was part of the process of creating a physical metal master for pressing vinyl on a lathe. A record cannot handle frequencies which are too low or too high and can not handle excessive dynamic range. So mastering tailored the music to allow the record to be pressed and perform properly in playback equipment. Now with CDs and other digital playback mediums, some of the reasons for mastering have been abandoned. But what happened...
read moreMixing studio mastering?
The band asks this question: What would happen if we had our mix engineer also do the mastering? This question is asked by most bands these days at some point. Budgets are small and mixing engineers like the fact that doing their own mastering gives them greater control over the project. Many times the mix engineer doesn’t charge too much for the mastering job, so money is not a primary motivation, but often the mixing engineer doesn’t have access to a high quality and flexible mastering house they can work with, so for...
read moreRecording metal guitar tone
Here is an instructional video I made several years back called “How to record professional heavy metal guitar tone” for recording engineers who want to perfect their abilities in metal guitar tone recording. It will be mostly relevant to those recording other styles as well. Its about 48 minutes long and covers a lot of material. My goal was to go over every aspect of guitar recording and to speak clearly for viewers who don’t have English as their first language. Engineers with under 5 – 7 years of recording...
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